1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a board retainer; more particularly, it relates to a circuit board retainer where the retainer is adapted to trap the edge of a circuit board or other planar object in a groove or channel within a cold wall.
2. State of the Prior Art
Previously, considerable difficulty had been experienced in adequately retaining printed circuit boards and other planar objects in uniform stress and heat transferring relationship with a preformed groove in a cold wall. U.S. Pat. No. 4,979,073 to Huested, U.S. Pat. No. 4,502,601 to Huested, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,975,805 to Spurling et al. all relate to devices for retaining the edge of a printed circuit board. These prior devices all serve either as stand alone clamps which do not permit or require the use of a groove in a cold wall, or as part of a structure which is machined into a specially configured receptacle in the cold wall. The devices of these prior patents in one form are mounted to the cold wall and provide all of the structure necessary to retain the edge of a circuit board in a heat dissipating relationship. Where it is desired to use a cold wall which has plain rectangular grooves formed in it with separate clamps, the devices of these prior patents are not appropriate. Previous expedients for clamping printed circuit board edges in plain rectangular grooved or slotted cold plates also included the use of wedging devices where wedging force was localized and applied nonuniformly along the retained edge of the board. Also, such prior wedging expedients required careful control of the application of the wedging force and tended to lose some of their wedging force when heated. In general such devices required very careful installation to ensure that they exerted the proper tension on the printed circuit board edge.